What Makes You Feel You Are Learning: Cues to Self-Regulated Learning

While learning in a multitext environment increases with the rise of electronic environments, little is known about what makes learners feel that they should continue learning or already learn enough from one text. The current study aimed at examining what cues learners use to regulate their effort among multiple sources in a multitext environment. By manipulating the amount of new information and conceptual overlap across texts within a topic, we created three types of text environments to generate different trajectories of two cues to perceived learning, new information (measured by rating of perceived new information) and encoding fluency (measured by ratings of reading ease). Results showed that the dominant cue to gauge perceived learning was the perceived amount of new information. The study extended theories in animal foraging and metacognition, and established a novel paradigm to better investigate adult learning in the wild.